Digital Customer Engagement: How Brands will Meet the Needs of Today’s Customer Across Any Digital Channel

In recent years, substantial effort has been dedicated to the task of creating simple and delightful digital experiences. The results speak for themselves, as social channels and applications have become central to nearly every facet of a customer’s daily experience.

This has led to a dynamic shift in how customers interact with brands globally, creating a new expectation for world-class interactions.

Customers now expect to communicate with brands in real-time through their channel of choice. If they don’t receive the desired response in a timely manner, chances are, they will quickly abandon the brand and switch to a competitor.

To put it simply, customers are in the driver’s seat.

Meeting these customer demands can be challenging for any enterprise. For success they need a digital customer engagement platform that enables them to engage with customers through popular digital communications channels. This will ensure employees are equipped with the information needed to provide superior customer service.

A digital customer engagement platform:

Enables customers to engage with brands through their channels of choice

For today’s customers, a simple email address and phone number is just one part of a multi-faceted identity comprised of the various digital channels that define their social experiences. The telephone was once the primary channel with which a customer would connect with a business. Today’s customers expect businesses to understand the various facets of their digital identity and the context in which each is used.

Keeping pace with the evolution of customer behavior is critical for businesses building a long term profitable relationship with customers. The long wait times and poor call routing of the past is today replaced with a requirement for immediate resolution and expectation for the experience to be simple and frictionless.

Aligns new customer service requirements with digital transformation initiatives

Customer service is costly to an enterprise. Businesses must be able to maximize every human interaction and make it as cost effective as possible. To do so requires the ability to use disparate data sources to understand and differentiate the value of customers and prioritize engagement.

For this, businesses need to look at the complete customer engagement narrative, composed of digital identity, CRM profile, and transaction history. Taking this one step further, this digital transformation allows businesses to then act on the narrative, in real time, solving both the goals of the business and the customer at the same time.

Provides employees with a clearer view into the context of a customer’s experience across channels

Once you paint the picture of a customer’s experience over time and across channels, you can equip agents to provide the best possible support for the customer. Agents immediately understand the customer’s complete identity, specific context of the current engagement, and history of interactions across digital channels.

Information of this nature is a powerful tool that reduces the amount of time a customer spends explaining context or solving a problem, eliminating the sometimes lengthy explanations that often begin a customer service interaction. Instead, businesses are able to quickly and efficiently understand the context of the customer’s communication.

Getting started

To enable businesses to accelerate their enterprise transformation and drive stronger engagement with customers, on October 23, 2018 we announced that RingCentral completed the acquisition of Dimelo, a leading digital customer experience platform.

Dimelo enables brands to manage all digital customer interactions through a single platform. It is currently being used by leading global enterprises spanning multiple industries including telcos, financial services, and retail.

Dimelo plays an important role in enabling RingCentral to further deliver on our vision to enable people to communicate and collaborate using their channels of choice. By combining forces with Dimelo, RingCentral continues to strengthen and deepen our product portfolio of next-generation customer engagement solutions. We will now be able to offer our enterprise customers an opportunity to start their journey to the cloud with a ‘digital-first’ approach.